Minotaur: Six Proposals for Freeing the
Refereed Literature Online: A Comparison

Stevan Harnad argues for the
self-archiving alternative.

Roberts et al., in Building a "GenBank" of the Published
Literature [1] argue compellingly for the following
three pleas to publishers and authors: It is imperative to free the
refereed literature online. To achieve this goal, the following should be
done:

Established journal publishers should give away their journal
contents online for free. (In the biomedical sciences, they can do this
by depositing them in PubMedCentral [2])

Authors should submit preferentially to journals that give their
contents away online for free (even boycotting those that do not).

In place of established journals that do not give away their contents
online for free, new journals (e.g., BioMed Central [3])
should be established that do.

The goal of freeing the refereed literature online is entirely valid,
optimal for science and scholarship, attainable, inevitable, and indeed
already overdue [4]. But Roberts et al.'s proposed means
alas do not look like the fastest or surest way of attaining that goal,
particularly as there is a tested and proven alternative means that will
attain the very same goal [5], without asking journals
to do anything, and without asking authors to give up anything:

(i) There is no reason journals should pre-emptively agree to give away
their own contents online at this time. If researchers wait until many or
most journals find a reason for doing so, it will be a very, very long
wait. (PubMedCentral has only twenty willing journals so far, out of many
thousand refereed biomedical journals).

(ii) Asking authors to choose which journal to submit their research to
on the basis of whether or not the journal agrees to give away its
contents online for free rather than on the basis authors currently use --
journal quality, reputation, impact factor -- is again an unreasonable
thing to ask, and will result in a long, long wait. More important, it is
an unnecessary thing to ask, as there is already a means for authors to
achieve precisely the same goal immediately without having to give up
anything at all: by self-archiving their refereed articles themselves, in
interoperable, University Eprint Archives [6].

(iii) Creating new journals, without track-records, to draw away
submissions from the noncompliant established journals, is another long
uphill path, and again it is not at all clear why authors should prefer to
take that path, renouncing their preferred established journals, when they
can have their cake and eat it too (through self-archiving).

In an editorial response to Roberts et al.'s article, entitled "Science's
Response: Is a Government Archive the Best Option?" [7],
AAAS has announced itself willing to free its contents one year after
publication (see my critique [8]).

(The New England
Journal of Medicine [20] plans to follow suit, and
undoubtedly other journals will soon do so too).

In the service of the same objective as that of Roberts et al., Sequeira
et al., in PubMed Central decides to decentralize [9]
announce a new policy from PubMedCentral (PMC). PMC already accepts
contents from publishers who are only willing to free them 6-12 months
after publication. Now PMC is ready to accept just the metadata from those
publishers, linking to their toll-gated websites, if they agree to give
away their contents on their own websites 6-12 months after publication.

This is another path that is likely to take a very long time to reach
its objective. And even then, can research really be called "free"
if it must wait 6-12 months to be released in each instance? Scientists
don't rush to make their findings public through PUBLICation in order to
have free access to them embargoed for 6-12 months [11].

Free access to refereed research a year after publication is better then
no access, but it's too little, too late. And there is no reason the
research community should wait for it. Delayed release is just as
inadequate a solution for this anomalous literature -- written by its
authors solely for its research impact, not for a share in the
access-blocking toll-gate-receipts (for which the majority,
royalty/fee-based literature is written) -- as lowered
subscription/license tolls are [10]. Lowered tolls,
like delayed release, are better than nothing, and welcome in the
short-term. But they are neither the long-term solution, nor the optimal
one, for research or researchers.

Currently there are six candidate
strategies for freeing the refereed research literature:

Authors paying journal publishers for publisher-supplied
online-offprints, free for all readers [12] is a good
solution where it is available, and where the author can afford to pay
for it, but (i) most journals don't offer it, (ii) there will always be
authors who cannot afford to pay for it, and (iii) authors
self-archiving their own eprints accomplishes the same outcome,
immediately, for everyone, at no expense to authors. Electronic
offprints for-fee require authors to pay for something that they can
already do for-free, now (as the authors of 150,000 physics papers have
already done [13]).

Boycotting journals that do not agree to give away their contents
online for free [19] requires authors to give up
their established journals of choice and to switch to unestablished
journals (if they exist), not on the basis of their quality or impact,
but on the basis of their give-away policy. But if authors simply
self-archive their papers, they can keep publishing in their established
journals of choice yet still ensure free online access for all readers.

Library consortial support (e.g. SPARC [11]) for
lower-priced journals may lower some of the access barriers, but it will
not eliminate them (instead merely entrenching unnecessary fee-based
access blockages still more deeply).

Delayed journal give-aways -- 6-to-12+ months after publication [14]
-- amount to too little, too late, and further entrench the
unjustifiable blockage of access to new research until it is not new [21].

Giving up established journals and peer review altogether, in favour
of self-archived preprints and post-hoc, ad-lib commentary (e.g. [15])
would put both the quality standards and the navigability of research at
risk (Harnad 1998/2000) [22].

Self-archiving all preprints and postprints can be done immediately
and will free the refereed literature overnight. The only things holding
authors back are (groundless and easily answered) worries about peer
review and copyright [16].

(1) - (5) all require waiting for policy changes and, even once these
are available, all require a needless sacrifice on the part of authors.
With (1) the sacrifice is the needless author offprint expense, with (2)
it is the author's right to submit to their preferred journals, with (3)
it is (as before) the author's potential impact on those potential users
who cannot afford even the lowered access tolls, with (4) it is the impact
of the all-important first 6-12 months after publication, and with (5) the
sacrifice is the quality of the literature itself.

Only (6) asks researchers for no sacrifices at all, and no waiting for
any change in journal policy or price. The only delay factor has been
authors' own relative sluggishness in just going ahead and doing it!
Nevertheless, (6) is well ahead of the other 5 candidates, in terms of the
total number of papers thus freed already, thanks to the lead taken by the
physicists.

It is high time for all the other disciplines to follow this lead,
rather than to wait, contemplating needless sacrifices and nonexistent
obstacles. Interoperable archive-creating software is available, free for
all universities to install and their researchers to fill [6].
Just go ahead and do it! The details of the self-archiving initiative for
freeing the entire refereed corpus now (including questions about
copyright and embargo policies) are fully described in Harnad (in prep) [17].
A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of freeing access to the
refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist
September Forum , [18].